I'll have to do a little more research on PixRipper and the like, but a good deal of them may be combatted by some crafty coding on our part. There's probably some header or behavior pattern that would determine an image downloader.
On another note, how about a coalition of large TGP owners put this plan of action to work:
Put hidden links on your main pages to a few fake galleries. Make all the "thumbs" on those gallery pages point to images located on the pixripper.com server. Depending on the algorithms used to parse out the images from the HTML, this could be devestating. A pity, really
